I went to Sedgwick County Park here in Wichita, Kansas Sunday to look for fall color. The first scene that I stopped for was this crazy multi-colored tree. I leave it to any botanists/arborists/tree experts for the scientific explanation. It looks as if the leaves are changing at wildly differing rates on various parts of the tree.

Another 2008 image from Acadia National Park. This was among the very first images I took in the park. We had arrived at Bar Harbor in the evening, and I took a little recon drive into the park. I recall driving around a curve and two things hit me….first I recognized this was beaver pond which I recognized from my trip research, second…wow! I HAD picked the right week to visit, fall color looked to be peaking inside the park. I wasn’t alone either, there were at least five cars parked along the road , and five to ten photographer with tripods shooting the trees and glassy water in the fading light. I pulled over, found a spot, and took a few photos myself of course, the best of which yous see here.

I’ve been revisiting some old images, and found this one from a 2008 visit to Acadia National Park in Maine. This one was overexposed but I was able to extract some lost detail and color in the sky, much to my surprise. Shooting RAW is the only way to fly! I believe that’s Otter Cliffs in the distance. I love Acadia – it’s a do-not-miss destination especially if you time it right, and visit in the correct one to two week period for fall colors. (Which varies year to year of course-usually sometime in October.)

Vermont, in the fall, seems to hold a photo opportunity around every bend in the road. My wife and I were exploring one of the secondary roads in central Vermont, and it seemed like we could do no wrong. I must have stopped our rental car every five minutes or so, jumped out, grabbed a few quick frames, and moved on. We came around a curve, and I saw this beautiful white horse standing there…I mean come on…this is like shooting fish in a barrel! As most of you know who labor at photography know, it’s not usually quite so easy. Sometimes you get lucky though.

What I find interesting about this image is the location. Sure, it’s a nice fall scene on the Little Arkansas (Ar-Kan-Sas not Ar-Kan-Saw – it’s a local thing ). What I find interesting is that it is in the middle of the largest city in Kansas, a metropolitan area of roughly 500,000 people last I heard. If you look closely you can see a few small hints at civilization in the image – what you can’t see are the house lined streets that parallel the river, or the busy four lane bridge/street behind the photographer. This is one of those scenes you would have about a two second glimpse of while crossing the bridge in traffic. I got that two second glimpse the other day, so later found a place to park and dashed out onto the bridge (not in the traffic lanes hehe) for a few quick frames. Too bad the sky was so bland, but you can’t have everything. I can always try again. It IS possible to find scenes like this in a heavily urban area, just a little tricky.

If you click on the image, the larger version shows the incredible structure of this leaf quite remarkably. I don’t own an actual macro lens, however I do have a Canon 500D close up lens, which is basically a high quality magnifier that screws onto the end of your regular lens. I was outdoors fooling around with it a couple of weeks ago. I picked up this leaf and held it up so the low sun was shining directly through the back of it. Aside from adjusting levels and desaturating the background, this is otherwise as-is. Fall color has been slow coming to Kansas, there is still a lot of green around, however in the last week or so I’m seeing more color.

A couple of weeks ago I posted an HDR image of Lower Baker Pond, New Hampshire that got a good response. I went back into my original files and found another bracketed set of exposures I took during that brief stop, looking in another direction. This time I attempted to process the HDR with less of a surreal look, aiming for something resembling what might be the result of using a neutral density graduated filter during the actual shot. I find it pleasing. The composition may lack that extra 5% to make it great, but the sky, mirror smooth water, and eye popping foliage was an irresistible combination.